Reinhold Niebuhr

Against pacifist sentiment and calls for isolationism, Reinhold Niebuhr insisted on a realistic Christian response to political crises, one willing to dirty its hands to avoid catastrophic evil. However, his dialectic between love and justice produces a catastrophic paradox.

In light of Reinhold Niebuhr’s writings, a realistic idealism can provide a basic approach to the refugee and migration crisis in Europe.

With his novel concept of sovereign obligation in A World in Disarray, Richard Haass makes an important advance in the search for peace in a disoriented world. But its advances fall short, unable to grasp the essential moral quality of world order.

The Responsibility to Protect owes its greatest debt to a religiously rooted approach to achieving peace with justice, the Christian just war tradition.

The notion of retribution or punishment has long been the scourge of social science. Christian thinkers should develop the distinction between retribution and revenge or retaliation.

We believe it is our responsibility to speak out at this time in order to provide a much-needed corrective to the current foreign policy debate.

Derek Chollet’s The Long Game defends Obama’s foreign policy and the president’s attempts to project global leadership in an era of infinite demands and finite resources.

Everything about Israel was, and is, draped in layers of irony and paradox. Israel is a Jewish state. It is also a secular democracy. Israel is the resurrected form of an ancient polity that disappeared two millennia ago; it is also a modern, economically-vibrant society that embraces progress in astonishing ways.

Religions, particularly the Christian faith that animated so much of US history, typically tell their adherents to pray for peace. A consortium of faith groups, under the umbrella “Evangelicals for Peace” has launched a thoughtful new year prayer initiative that anyone can participate in.